The Saint in Action (The Saint Series) Page 14

  “We’ve got a date to be shot up at East Lulworth at half-past ten,” he said cheerfully, and gave them a literal account of the conversation.

  “They’re making you travel a bit before they kill you,” said Peter. “Are you going on with this mad idea of yours?”

  “It’s the only thing to do if we’re sticking to our plan of campaign. We’re fish on the rise tonight, and we’ll go on rising until we get a line if it—”

  He broke off with his hand whipping instinctively to his pocket again as a bicycle whirred out of the shadows towards them at racing speed. The brakes grated as it shot by, and a man almost threw himself off the machine and turned back towards them. A moment later the Saint saw that it was Jopley.

  “Thank Gawd I caught yer,” he gasped. “I was afride it ’ud be too late. Yer mustn’t go ter Lulworth tonight!”

  “That’s a pity,” said the Saint tranquilly. “But I just made a date to go there.”

  “Yer carn’t do it, sir! They’ll be wytin’ for yer wiv a machine-gun. I ’eard ’im givin’ the orders, an’ ’ow the lidy was ter meet yer ’ere an’ tell yer the tile, an’ everythink—”

  Simon became suddenly alert.

  “You heard who giving the orders?” he shot back.

  “The boss ’imself it was—’e’s at Gad Cliff ’Ouse naow!”

  9

  The Saint’s lighter flared in the darkness, catching the exultant glint in his eyes under impudently slanted brows. When the light went out and left only the glow-worm point of his cigarette, it was as if something vital and commanding had been abruptly snatched away, leaving an irreparable void, but out of the void his voice spoke with the gay lilt of approaching climax.

  “That’s even better,” he said. “Then we don’t have to go to Lulworth…”

  “You must be disappointed,” Peter said sympathetically. “After looking forward to being shot up with a machine-gun—”

  “This is easier,” said the Saint. “This is the fish sneaking out of the river a little way downstream and wriggling along the bank to bite the fisherman in the pants. Peter, I have a feeling that this is going to be Comrade Lasser’s unlucky day.”

  “It might just as well have been any other day,” Peter objected. “He isn’t any unknown quantity. He’s in the telephone book. Probably he’s in Who’s Who as well. You could find out everything about him and all his habits, and choose your own time—”

  “You couldn’t choose any time like this! Just because he is supposed to be such a respectable citizen, his pants would be a tough proposition to bite. Can you imagine us trying to hold him up in his own baronial halls, or taking him for a ride from the Athenaeum Club? Why, he could call on the whole of Scotland Yard, including Chief Inspector Teal, not to mention the Salvation Army and the Brigade of Guards, to rally round and look after him if we tried anything. But this is different. Now he isn’t a pillar of Society and Industry, surrounded by bishops and barons. He’s in bad company, with a machine-gun party waiting for us at East Lulworth—and while he’s waiting for news from them he’s sitting up at Gad Cliff House, on top of the biggest store of contraband that the Revenue never set eyes on. We’ve got him with the goods on him, and this is where we take our chance!”

  Peter Quentin shrugged.

  “All right,” he said philosophically. “I’d just as soon take my chance at this house as take it with a machine-gun. Lead on, damn you.”

  Mr Uniatz cleared his throat, producing a sound like the eruption of a small volcano. The anxiety that was vexing his system could be felt even if it could not be seen. Ever a stickler for detail once he had assimilated it, Mr Uniatz felt that one important item was being overlooked in the flood of ideas that had recently been passing over his head.”

  “Boss,” said Mr Uniatz lucidly, “de skoit.”

  “What about her?” asked the Saint.

  “She didn’t look to me like she had no bottles in her braseer.”

  “She hadn’t.”

  “Den why—”

  “We’re giving her a rest, Hoppy. This is another guy we’re going to see.”

  “Oh, a guy,” said Mr Uniatz darkly. “Den how come he’s wearin’ a—”

  “He’s funny that way,” said the Saint hastily. “Now let’s have a look at the lie of the land. He led the way over to the Hirondel and spread out a large-scale ordnance map under the dashboard light. Gad Cliff House was plainly marked on it, standing in about three acres of ground bordered on one side by the cliff itself, and approached by a narrow lane from the road that ran over the high ground parallel with the coast.

  “That’s plain enough,” said the Saint, after a brief examination of the plan. “But what are the snags?”

  He looked round and found Jopley’s face at his shoulder, seeming even more sullen and evil in the dim greenish glow of the light. The man shook his head.

  “It’s ’opeless, that’s wot the snag is,” he said bluntly. “There’s alarms orl rahnd the plice—them invisible rye things. A rabbit couldn’t get in wivout settin’ ’em orf.”

  “But you were able to get out.”

  “Yus, I got aht.”

  “Well, how did you manage it?”

  “I said I ’ad ter go aht an’ buy some fags.”

  “I mean,” said the Saint, with the almost supernatural self-control developed through long association with Hoppy Uniatz, “how did you get out through these alarms?”

  Jopley said slowly, “I got aht fru the gates.”

  “And how will you get back?”

  “I’ll git back the sime wye. The man ooze watchin’ there, ’e knows me, an’ ’e phones up to the ’ouse an’ ses ’oo it is, an’ they ses it’s orl right, an’ ’e opens the gates an’ lets me in.”

  The Saint folded his map.

  “Well,” he said deliberately, “suppose when this bird had the gates open to let you in, some other blokes who were waiting outside rushed the pair of you, laid him out, and let themselves in—would anyone at the house know what had happened?”

  The man thought it out laboriously. “Not till ’e came to an’ told ’em.”

  “Then—”

  “But yer carn’t git in that wye,” Jopley stated flatly. “Not letting me in for it, yer carn’t. Wot ’appens when they find aht I done it? Jer fink I wanter git meself bashed over the ’ead an’ frown to the muckin’ lobsters?”

  Simon smiled.

  “You don’t have to get thrown to the lobsters, Algernon,” he said. “I’m rather fond of lobsters, and I wouldn’t have that happen for anything. You don’t even have to get bashed over the head, except in a friendly way for the sake of appearances. And ‘they’ don’t have to find out anything about it—although I don’t think they’ll be in a position to do you much damage anyway, when I’m through with them. But if it’ll make you any happier, you don’t have to be compromised at all. You just happened to be there when we rushed in, and nobody could prove anything different. And it’d be worth a hundred pounds to you—on the nail.”

  Jopley looked from one face to the other while the idea seemed to establish itself in his mind. For a few seconds the Saint was afraid that fear would still make him refuse, and wondered what other arguments would carry conviction. In mentioning a hundred pounds he had gone to the limits of bribery, and it was more or less an accident that he had as much money as that in his pockets…He held his breath until Jopley answered.

  “When do I get this ’undred quid?”

  Simon opened his wallet and took out a folded wad of banknotes. Jopley took them in his thick fingers and glanced through them. His heavy sulky eyes turned up again to the Saint’s face.

  “I won’t do nothing else, mind. Yer can rush me along o’ the other bloke, an’ if yer can git inside that’s orl right. But I didn’t ’ave nothink ter do wiv it, see?”

  “We’ll take care of that,” said the Saint confidently. “All we want is to know when you’re going back, so that we can be ready. And it had better
be soon, because the time’s getting on. I want to be in that house before the machine-gun squad gets back from Lulworth.”

  “I can start back naow,” said the other grudgingly. “If you drive there in yer car, yer’ll’ave ten minutes before I git there on me bike.” The Saint nodded.

  “Okay,” he said peacefully. “Then let’s go!”

  The steady drone of the Hirondel sank through his mind into silence as the long shining car swept up the winding road towards the crest of the downs. Instead of it, as if the words were being spoken again beside his ears, he heard Brenda Marlow’s clear unfaltering voice saying, “You wouldn’t have expected us to keep him after we knew he was selling us out to you, would you?” Lasser, Pargo, what had been done to Pargo, and what might be done at Gad Cliff House that night—those other thoughts were a vague jumble that was almost blotted out by the clearness of the words which he was hearing over again in memory. And he could feel again the chill of downright horror that had struck him like an icy wind when he heard them first.

  Simon Templar had travelled too far on the iron highways of outlawry to be afflicted with empty sentimentality, and he had been flippant enough about death in his time—even about such ugly death as Pargo’s. But about such an utter unrelenting callousness, coming without the flicker of an eyelash from a face like the one he had seen when it was being spoken, there was a quality of epic inhumanity to which even the Saint could not adjust himself. It made her look like something beside which a blend of Messalina and Lucrezia Borgia would have seemed like a playful schoolgirl—and yet he could recall just as clearly the edged contempt in her voice, after she had overheard the lurid bluff he had encouraged Hoppy to put over on Jopley, when she said, “We’ll leave things like that to gentlemen like Mr Templar.” The contradiction fretted at the smooth surface of his reasoning with maddening persistence, and yet the one and only apparent way of reconciling it raised another question which it was too late now to track down to its possible conclusions…

  A dull kind of tightness settled over the Saint’s nerves as he brought the Hirondel to a stop just beyond the opening of the lane that led to the entrance of Gad Cliff House. He switched off the engine and climbed out without any visible sign of it, but his right hand felt instinctively for the hilt of the sharp throwing-knife strapped to his left forearm under the sleeve, and found it with an odd sense of comfort. At other times when he had made mistakes, that hidden and unlooked-for weapon had brought rescue out of defeat, and the touch of it reassured him. He turned to meet the others without a change in his blithe serenity.

  “You know what you have to do, boys and girls,” he said. “Follow me, and let’s make it snappy.”

  Mr Uniatz coughed, peering at him through the darkness with troubled intensity.

  “I dunno, boss,” he said anxiously. “I never hoid of dis invisible rye. Is dat what de guy has in de bottles in his—”

  “Yes, that’s it,” said the Saint, with magnificent presence of mind. “You go on an invisible jag on it, and end up by seeing invisible pink elephants. It saves any amount of trouble. Now get hold of your Betsy and shut up, because there may be invisible ears.”

  The lane ran between almost vertical grass banks topped by stiff thorn hedges, and it was so narrow that a car driven down it would have had no more than a few inches clearance on either side. The car that came up it from the road must have been driven by someone who knew his margins with the accuracy of long experience, for it swooped out of the night so swiftly and suddenly that the Saint’s hearing had scarcely made him aware of its approach when it was almost on top of them, its headlights turning the lane into a trench of blinding light. Simon had an instant of desperate indecision while he reckoned their chance of scaling the steep hedge-topped banks and realised that they could never do it in time, and then he wheeled to face the danger with his hand leaping to his gun. Hoppy’s movement was even quicker, but it was still too late. Another light sprang up dazzlingly from behind the gates just ahead of them; they were trapped between the two opposing broadsides of eye-searing brilliance and the two high walls of the lane as if they had been caught in a box, and Simon knew without any possibility of self-deception that they were helplessly at the mercy of the men behind the lights.

  “Put up your hands,” ordered a new voice from the car, and the Saint acknowledged to himself how completely and beautifully he had been had.

  10

  “I might have known you’d be a great organiser, brother,” murmured the Saint, as he led the way obediently into the library of Gad Cliff House with his hands held high in the air. “But you were certainly in form tonight.”

  The compliment was perfectly sincere. When Simon Templar fell into traps he liked them to be good ones, for the sake of his own self-esteem, and the one he had just walked into so docilely struck him as being a highly satisfactory specimen from every point of view.

  It was all so neat and simple and psychologically watertight, once you were let into the secret. He had kept his first appointment with Brenda Marlow, as anyone would have known he would. He had been duly suspicious of the second appointment at the cross-roads in East Lulworth, as he was meant to be. He had accepted it merely as a confirmation of those suspicions when Jopley arrived with the warning of the machine-gun party—exactly as he was meant to do. And with the memory of the proposition he had made to Jopley the night before still fresh in his mind, the rest of the machinery had run like clockwork. He had been so completely disarmed that even Jopley’s well-simulated reluctance to lead him into the very trap he was meant to be led into was almost a superfluous finishing touch. A good trap was something that the Saint could always appreciate with professional interest, but a trap within a trap was a refinement to remember. He had announced himself as being in the market for bait, and verily he had swallowed everything that was offered him.

  Simon admitted the fact, and went on from there. They were in the soup, but even if it was good soup it was no place to stay in. He reckoned the odds dispassionately. Their guns had been taken away from them, but his knife had escaped the search. That was the only asset he could find on his own side—that, and whatever his own quickness of thought was worth, which on its recent showing didn’t seem to be very much. And yet no one who looked at him would have seen a trace of the grim concentration that was driving his brain on a fierce, defiant search for the inspiration that would turn the tables again.

  He smiled at Lasser with all the carefree and unruffled ease that only reached its airiest perfection with him when the corner was tightest and the odds were too astronomical to be worth brooding over.

  “What does it feel like to be a Master Mind?” he inquired interestedly.

  Lasser beamed back at him, with his rich, jolly face shining as if it had been freshly scrubbed.

  “I’ve read a lot about you,” he said, “so I knew I should have to make a special effort. In fact, I’m not too proud to admit that I’ve picked up a few tips from the stories I’ve heard of you. Naturally, when I knew who our distinguished opponent was, I tried not to disappoint him.”

  “You haven’t,” said the Saint cordially. “Except that I may have expected a larger deputation of welcome.”

  His gaze drifted over the assembly with the mildest and most apologetic hint of criticism. Besides Lasser, there was only Jopley and one other man, presumably the gatekeeper—a short, thick-set individual with a cast in one eye and an unshaven chin that gave him a vicious and sinister aspect which was almost too conventional to be true. There was also Brenda Marlow, who came into the room last and sat on the arm of a chair near the door, watching from the background with an expression that the Saint couldn’t quite analyse.

  “I think there are enough of us,” said Lasser blandly. He turned to Jopley. “You searched them all thoroughly?”

  The man grunted an affirmative, and Lasser’s glance passed fleetingly over Peter Quentin and Hoppy and glowed on the Saint again.

  “You can put your hands
down,” he said. “It will be more comfortable for you. And sit down, if you want to.” He tugged at the lobe of his ear absent-mindedly while the Saint turned a chair round and relaxed in it, crossing his legs. “Ah—about this deputation of welcome. Yes. I had thought of giving you more of a show, but I decided not to. You see, I brought you here to talk over some more or less private business, and I thought the fewer people who knew about it the better. You have rather a persuasive way with you, Mr Templar, so Jopley tells me, and I shouldn’t want you to tempt any more of my employees. Will you have a drink?”

  “I’d love one,” said the Saint graciously, and Lasser turned to the villainous specimen with the unshaven chin.

  “Some drinks, Borieff.”

  Simon took out his cigarette-case while Borieff slouched over to a cupboard under one of the bookshelves and brought out a bottle and a siphon.

  “You know, this makes me feel quite guilty,” he said. “I’ve had so many drinks with you before, and yet I’ve never bought you one.”

  “Two van-loads, isn’t it?” Lasser agreed, with his fat, bright smile. “And the other van with—um—silks and things in it. Yes, yes. That’s what I brought you here to talk to you about. We shall have to have those vans back, of course, what you haven’t actually used of them.”

  “Hoppy certainly has rather improved the shining hour,” Simon admitted. “But there’s quite a lot left. What sort of an offer were you thinking of making?” Lasser shook his head.

  “No,” he said judiciously. “No, I wasn’t thinking of making an offer. I just want them back. I’m afraid you’re going to have to tell us where to find them. That’s why I arranged for you to come here.”

  “What’s all this,” Brenda Marlow asked quietly, “about bringing them here?”

  She had been so much in the background that the others seemed to have forgotten her, and when she spoke it was as startling an intrusion as if she had not been there before and had just walked in. Lasser looked round at her, blinking.